Create new skills, modify and improve existing skills, and measure skill performance. Use when the user wants to create a skill from scratch, edit or improve an existing skill, run evals to test a skill, benchmark skill performance with variance analysis, or tune a skill's description for better triggering accuracy. Triggers on "create a skill", "make a skill for", "turn this into a skill", "improve this skill", "why isn't my skill triggering", "test this skill", or "tune the description". Also fires when the ask arrives in work vocabulary instead of tool vocabulary: "turn my process into assistants", "build me a team of assistants", "break my workflow into single-job assistants", "I want one assistant per step", "make me an employee that does X".
Install with Codex or Claude Copy this prompt, paste it into Codex, Claude, or another assistant, and let it review the skill page and install it for you.
A direct command skips the review prompt. Inspect the source before running it.
Create new skills, modify and improve existing skills, and measure skill performance. Use when the user wants to create a skill from scratch, edit or improve an existing skill, run evals to test a skill, benchmark skill performance with variance analysis, or tune a skill's description for better triggering accuracy. Triggers on "create a skill", "make a skill for", "turn this into a skill", "improve this skill", "why isn't my skill triggering", "test this skill", or "tune the description". Also fires when the ask arrives in work vocabulary instead of tool vocabulary: "turn my process into assistants", "build me a team of assistants", "break my workflow into single-job assistants", "I want one assistant per step", "make me an employee that does X".
why
A skill that never triggers, or triggers on the wrong prompts, is dead weight - this makes the description, the only thing the model sees before loading a skill, something you test rather than guess at.
enhance
Run the description length check at every edit, not just at creation - a tuning pass that scores well on triggering can quietly push the description past the install ceiling and the skill silently stops loading.
summary
Create, improve, and measure skills - and tune why they trigger.
allowed-tools
["Read","Write","Edit","Glob","Grep","Bash"]
mcp_requirements
[]
Skill Creator
Runs on: local-writes - creates or edits files in your OS folder; needs an agent with write access.
A skill for creating new skills and iteratively improving them.
At a high level, the process of creating a skill goes like this:
Decide what you want the skill to do and roughly how it should do it
Write a draft of the skill
Create a few test prompts and run a copy of the model that has access to the skill on them
Help the user evaluate the results both qualitatively and quantitatively
Rewrite the skill based on the user's evaluation of the results (and any glaring flaws the quantitative benchmarks surface)
Repeat until you are satisfied
Expand the test set and try again at larger scale
Your job when using this skill is to figure out where the user is in this process and then jump in and help them progress. They might say "I want to make a skill for X" - then you help narrow down what they mean, write a draft, write the test cases, run them, and iterate. Or they might already have a draft - then you go straight to the eval and iterate part of the loop.
Be flexible. If the user says "I do not need a bunch of evaluations, just vibe with me", do that instead.
From a described process to a team of single-job assistants
The ask often arrives in work vocabulary, not tool vocabulary: an operator describes how they produce something - research, then a mood board, then the concept, then the deck - and wants "assistants" or "employees", one per step. This flow was specced by watching a real operator design exactly that, and her constraints are the design rules:
Capture the process in their words first. Before building anything, get the scrappy workflow out of their head: the steps, the decisions at each step, what good output looks like to them. The sop-writer skill is the capture tool; a pasted voice-note transcript of them explaining it works just as well. Do not improve the process while capturing it - capture, then build.
One job per assistant. Resist bundling steps because it would be "more efficient". A narrow assistant can be judged, corrected, and trusted; a do-everything assistant fails vaguely. When one step's output is bad, you fix that one assistant - blame the employee, not the team.
The human keeps the taste decisions. Build each assistant to do the thinking and present options: research, alternatives, drafts. The operator picks. Never automate the picking unless they explicitly ask - and when scale-it-up comes up early, say the honest thing: automating a process you have not yet run manually multiplies mistakes, it does not fix them.
Effectiveness before efficiency. Each assistant runs manually, gets reviewed, gets corrected, until it produces roughly what the operator would have produced - only then do speed, chaining, or scale earn attention.
A seat is earned, then registered. When an assistant has run for real and kept its place, add it to roles/employees.yaml with an honest charter: what it may write, what it never does. Doctrine in rules/digital-employees.md; gated until it has actually run is the honest default.
Each assistant is just a skill under this flow - the loop below (draft, test on real work, correct, repeat) is how every one of them gets good.
After the skill is done, you can also run a description-tuning pass to improve how reliably the skill triggers.
This file is the router. The full procedure for each heavy step lives in a references/ file. Load the reference for the step you are on, when you reach it - not all at once.
Test cases + running and evaluating runs (the eval loop, steps 1-5)
references/evals.md
Improving the skill from feedback + the iteration loop
references/improving.md
Description tuning for triggering accuracy
references/description-tuning.md
Description length - HARD CHECK (mandatory)
Some skill loaders silently fail to install a skill whose description: value runs over roughly 1,024 characters. The failure surfaces no error - the skill installs, never triggers, and the user only notices weeks later when a use case that should have invoked it goes unhandled. Loud failure is preferable to silent install.
Run this check at every point a description is written or modified:
Initial draft (when first writing the SKILL.md frontmatter)
After applying a tuned best_description from the description-tuning step
Any later edit to the description: field
Procedure:
Count the characters of the description: value (the string after the key, including a folded > block's joined text).
If over 1024: STOP. Do not write or install. Report the actual length and the overflow. Propose a trimmed version that preserves the trigger phrases.
If over 900 and at or under 1024: WARN. The description is in the danger zone. Likely fine but at risk if a future edit adds words. Suggest a trim.
If at or under 900: PASS. Proceed.
This check is non-negotiable.
Communicating with the user
This skill gets used by people across a wide range of familiarity with technical jargon. Pay attention to context cues to understand how to phrase your communication.
"evaluation" and "benchmark" are borderline but usually fine
for "JSON" and "assertion" wait for clear cues that the user knows those terms before using them without explaining
It is fine to briefly explain a term if you are in doubt. A short definition costs one line.
Creating a skill
Capture intent
Start by understanding the user's intent. The current conversation might already contain a workflow the user wants to capture (for example, they say "turn this into a skill"). If so, extract answers from the conversation history first - the tools used, the sequence of steps, corrections the user made, input and output formats observed. Have the user fill the gaps and confirm before moving on.
What should this skill enable the model to do?
When should this skill trigger? (which user phrases and contexts)
What is the expected output format?
Should we set up test cases to verify the skill works? Skills with objectively verifiable outputs (file transforms, data extraction, code generation, fixed workflow steps) benefit from test cases. Skills with subjective outputs (writing style, design) often do not. Suggest the right default based on the skill type, but let the user decide.
Interview and research
Ask about edge cases, input and output formats, example files, success criteria, and dependencies. Wait to write test prompts until this is ironed out.
Check available tools and MCPs. If any are useful for research (searching docs, finding similar skills, looking up best practices), research in parallel via subagents where available, otherwise inline. Come prepared so you reduce the burden on the user.
Write the SKILL.md
Now read references/writing-guide.md for the full SKILL.md authoring guide: the frontmatter components, the anatomy of a skill, progressive disclosure, the principle of no surprise, the writing patterns, and the writing style.
Test and evaluate
When the draft is ready, read references/evals.md for the full procedure: writing test cases to evals/evals.json, spawning with-skill and baseline runs, drafting assertions, capturing timing, grading, aggregating into a benchmark, and reading the feedback.
Improving the skill
After the runs and the user's review, read references/improving.md for how to think about improvements (generalize, keep lean, explain the why, bundle repeated work) and the iteration loop.
Description tuning
After creating or improving a skill, offer to tune the description for better triggering accuracy. Read references/description-tuning.md for the full tuning loop: generating trigger eval queries, reviewing with the user, running the tuning loop, how triggering works, applying the winner, and the mandatory length check.
Updating an existing skill
The user might be asking you to update an existing skill, not create a new one. In that case:
Preserve the original name. Keep the skill's directory name and name frontmatter field unchanged.
Copy to a writeable location before editing if the installed path is read-only. Edit the copy, then move it back.
Re-run the length check on the modified description before considering it done.
Output rules
No em dashes or en dashes. Hyphens only, with spaces around them.
No banned words (delve, robust, seamless, leverage, comprehensive, holistic, transformative, streamline, optimize, utilize, facilitate, unlock, navigate, ecosystem, landscape).
When you finish a skill, summarize what it does, where it lives, and how to test it.
Repeating the core loop for emphasis:
Figure out what the skill is about
Draft or edit the skill
Run a copy of the model that has access to the skill on test prompts
With the user, evaluate the outputs both qualitatively and quantitatively
Repeat until you and the user are satisfied
Run the length check before declaring the skill done
